


Cosmos

by localspacelesbian



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Carl Sagan - Freeform, Fluff, Gen, Infodumping, Mentions of Death, Very Light Angst?, reggie is a space nerd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29003379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/localspacelesbian/pseuds/localspacelesbian
Summary: Reggie learns what happened to his favorite childhood icon, and Julie learns something about Reggie.
Relationships: Julie Molina & Reggie Peters
Comments: 10
Kudos: 69





	Cosmos

Julie sat on the couch flipping through Disney Plus, looking for something to watch with Reggie. With Luke visiting his parents, Alex with Willie, and Carlos and her dad at a baseball game, the two of them had the house to themselves, and they decided to take full advantage of that to Disney Plus and Chill, only in the most literal sense of course. Reggie was the one most interested in continuing her efforts to catch the boys up on everything they’d missed in the past 25 years. (At least, Alex had Willie to show him, and Luke didn't have the attention span.) At the moment, nothing was really popping out at her. She considered something  _ Star Wars _ , but she decided she’d need the other two here to help provide emotional support when they finally embarked on that journey. She was about to skip past the documentary section when Reggie suddenly sat up.

“Wait. They have  _ Cosmos _ on here? I loved that show as a kid.”

Julie looked at him, back the screen, and back a Reggie, blinking a few times. “Really? I never pegged you as a science nerd.”

Reggie shrugged, suddenly sheepish. “My grandparents had them all on VHS. ‘Sides, space is cool.”

“Space is cool,” She agreed. “We can watch it if you want, but it’s not actually the same show. This is the reboot with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.”

“Who’s that?”

She shrugged. “Big science guy. Honestly, not really a fan. I prefer Bill Nye.”

Reggie gave her a confused look. “Why didn’t they just have Carl Sagan do it?”

She glanced down, not really sure how to break it to him. She reached out and put her hand over his. “Reggie, Carl Sagan’s dead.”

His mouth opened and his eyebrows went up. “No.” He shook his head. “No, he can’t be.”

She nodded, giving him a sad smile. “I’m sorry, Reggie. He died before I was even born.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I can google it if you want?” He nodded, and she set down the remote to grab her phone, typing in Carl Sagan with one hand, keeping the other on top of Reggie’s. She opened up his Wikipedia article. “Ok, he died in 1996, so only a year after you did.” She skipped down to the section about his death and read aloud, “After suffering from…” She paused stumbling over the pronunciation of the next word, “myelodysplasia for two years and receiving three bone marrow transplants from his sister, Sagan died from pneumonia at the age of 62.”

“What is…” He looked over her shoulder at the phone and pointed at the word neither of them knew how to pronounce. “That.”

She clicked on it, switching over to a new article. “Some type of cancer.” She decided she didn’t want to keep reading and locked her phone screen before setting it down

He sat back. “Oh.”

She looked over at him. “I’m sorry, Reggie.”

He shrugged. “It’s fine. It’s not like I actually knew him or anything.”

“That doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to be sad. He was an important part of your childhood.” She thought about all of the musicians they had loved who had died since 1995. And  _ God _ , she was not looking forward to him finding out about Carrie Fisher. For every fun thing she had to show them that they’d missed, there was always going to be something like this. She opened up her arms. “Come here.” He leaned into the hug, letting her rub his back soothingly. It was times like this she was very glad they could hug now.

After a minute, she asked softly, “Hey, do still you want to watch  _ Cosmos _ ? I think I could probably find the original version on YouTube or something.”

He looked up at her and nodded, with a small smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”

She smiled and picked up the remote again to switch apps. “But, fair warning, it is pretty old, so some of the science might be outdated.”

“It hasn’t been  _ that _ long.”

“For you maybe, but for the rest of the world, it’s been like, 30 years. Or 40? When did this come out?” She shook her head. “Whatever. A lot has changed in astronomy since then.”

“Like what?” Reggie challenged, an excited glint in his eye.

She smirked. “Well, back then, they still thought Pluto was a planet.”

His smile fell. “Wait, what? You’re messing with me, right? Of course Pluto’s a planet.”

She shook her head. “Nope. Sometime in the early 2000’s, they decided Pluto wasn’t big enough to be a planet anymore.”

“So what is it then?”

“A dwarf planet.”

“That just sounds like a type of planet.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I just know that now, there are only eight planets. At least in this solar system,” she added with another smirk.

“What do you mean ‘in this solar system?’” She bit her lip to keep herself from laughing. “Julieeeee…” He drew out her name, almost whining. “You can’t just say that and not explain! Did you guys find aliens while we were gone? Are there aliens, Julie? Please tell me I didn’t miss out on finding aliens!”

This time she did laugh. “No, we haven’t found aliens. But have found planets outside of our solar system. Thousands of them.”

“Thousands?!”

She nodded. “Yep.” He looked off to the side, as if contemplating the implications of the discovery of thousands of exoplanets. She tilted her head to the side. “You want to go look up stuff about exoplanets now, don’t you?”

He bit his lip and glanced between her and the screen. “Kind of? But I also really want to watch  _ Cosmos _ .”

She smiled. “ _ Cosmos _ now, research later?”

He nodded and snuggled up to her again as she found the series on YouTube and pressed play. Reggie was captivated, even though she could tell by the way he mouthed along with some of the lines that he had seen it many times before. Julie, meanwhile, was all too quickly lulled to sleep by the soothing sounds of Carl Sagan’s voice.

When she awoke, she noticed that rather than the weight of Reggie leaning against her, she felt a blanket on top of her. Confused, she looked around. The room was darker now, and the tv was paused, showing a black screen with galaxies scattered across it. She looked over the back of the couch to see Reggie sitting at her dad’s desk, hunched over her laptop.

“Julie!” He grinned when he noticed her looking at him. “You’re up! Sorry, I hope you don’t mind, but I couldn’t stop thinking about exoplanets and Pluto, and I was getting restless, and you were asleep-”

“It’s fine, Reggie.” She sat up on her knees and leaned her arms on the back of the couch. “So you find anything interesting?”

He nodded quickly. “Ok, first of all, Pluto was reclassified cause this guy, Mike Brown, discovered these other objects out past Neptune. And it took a while to confirm it, but one of them he was sure was bigger than Pluto, so he thought he’d found another planet! And since then, they’ve found out it’s actually slightly smaller than Pluto, but still very exciting. And they kept finding more objects out there. And they decided they needed to figure out what to call them cause we couldn’t suddenly have like, 20 plus planets, right? So they had a meeting where they were gonna redefine the word planet, and they voted and ended up deciding that we only have eight planets, and the objects that were almost like planets but not quite big enough to clear their orbits would be called dwarf planets, which actually isn’t a type of planet, ‘cause they voted on that too and decided against it. And it was like a huge controversy. And people even sent this guy and his team  _ death threats _ over it. Like, come on, I thought I cared too much about space, but that’s a bit extreme. And he has a book about the whole thing that I kind of really want to read now.”

Julie nodded slowly, blinking a couple times because that was kind of a lot to take in in a short period of time. “Wow. That is really interesting.” And it  _ was _ , but she was just happy to listen to Reggie talk so excitedly about it. She decided she was going to try to find that book for him later. “And what about exoplanets?”

He nodded again. “Ok, I only just started looking into that. You were right that they’ve found thousands of them.” He glanced at the screen for a second. “4,331 confirmed discoveries and 5708 candidates waiting to be confirmed, to be exact. Isn’t that like, the coolest thing ever?”

She couldn’t help but smile at his enthusiasm. “It is.”

He looked back at the screen, sighing as he rest his head on his fist. Confused when she didn’t get another infodump rant like she’d been expecting, she climbed over the back of the couch to stand next to him and see what he was looking at. NASA’s webpage all about exoplanets. “Hey, you ok?”

He nodded. “Yeah, it’s just. Sometimes it hits me how long it’s been, you know? Like, we died, and we went to that dark room, and it only felt like an hour, but we come back and everything has changed. And a lot of those changes are really cool. Like this.” He gestured toward the screen, and she wasn’t sure if she meant exoplanets or the computer. “But it’s still just… Carl Sagan doesn’t get to be here as a ghost to see all of this. Or maybe he is somewhere, I don’t know.” He sighed again.

“Yeah…” She put her arms around him and hugged him from behind, resting her chin on his head. “I’m sorry.”

He put his hand on her arms. “It’s ok. It’s still really fun to learn about all this stuff we missed.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “But…”

“But?”

“As much as I love  _ learning _ about space, I also miss being able to _ see _ it.”

She frowned. “There couldn’t have been that much less light in LA in the 90’s.”

He shook his head. “No, I think it was worse actually. I was actually reading about how LA’s made a lot of progress in reducing light pollution the past few years, but there’s only so much you can do in a city this big. I mean on my grandparents’ ranch. I used to spend every summer there. Just the three of us and the animals and no lights for miles around.” She could hear the soft smile in his voice. “I could see the Milky Way at night from the backyard. My grandparents would tell me stories about all the constellations and stuff. That’s kinda what got me interested in space in the first place.”

Julie smiled at the image of little Reggie with his grandparents looking up at the stars. “That sounds nice.”

“Yeah… It was.”

“I’ve never actually seen the Milky Way. At least not in person.”

He looked up at her, forcing her to lift her head up. “That, my dear Julie, is a crime. And one that must be remedied as soon as possible.”

She laughed. "Yeah?"

He nodded very seriously. "Of course."

"Well, I look forward to it. But for now, my dear Reginald," She grabbed his hand to pull him up, "we have a show watch."

"Promise you won't fall asleep this time?"

"I'll do my best."


End file.
